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83 thoughts on “Holy Crap, Michael Jackson’s Dead”

Incidentally, something weird’s going on with the comments on this end, in which once you press the “submit” button, you get a blank page. If you’re seeing the same thing, don’t panic, your comment’s probably gone through. I suspect it’s some sort of glitch on the WordPress.com side.

@Johnny #3 A friend just posted this on Facebook, and it made me laugh!
“Aww, snap! Somewhere, Farrah Fawcett is royally pissed off. Michael Jackson just stole all the magazine cover stories right underneath from her casket.”

That said, today is fired. My childhood is even farther away than it was supposed to be after today was over. I’ve been mourning Jackson’s creative talent for years. This just caps how sad and strange his life was.

When I was just starting to be aware of my generation’s music, its deities were already dying premature, mostly drug-related deaths: Brian, Jimi, Janis, Jim. They died with their youth and legends intact.

It’s profoundly sad to see some more mileposts of my younger days dying, neither legendarily young nor in the fullness of age, but still too soon.

It’s hard to think of him as being 50; it was hard to think of him as the grotesque he became. In my mind’s eye and ear, he’s forever the demon-king of The Thriller.

Joel @5: I’m so sorry about your student. My first year of teaching, a student (not mine) was killed in a bizarre manner not worth recounting here, and it colored most of the fall semester for many of my students, as well as the teachers who knew him.

I can’t see how one could put his life into perspective. From elementary school on, his life was subsumed into the Jackson 5. From age eight or so, he was a superstar, both to his benefit and detriment. Nearly his entire live was lived out/acted out on a worldwide stage in the blinding glare of camera lights, his every action fodder for media speculation. He had no normal life as we would describe it; his “life” was so much bigger that than. Which was both a benefit and curse.

Sure they were a Rock and Roll format and like many Rock radio stations they didn’t play a lot of R&B or what would later become hip hop, but just because they thought Rick James was too racey doesn’t mean it was a “whites only” station.

Ed@25: I think Princess Diana’s passing was a pretty big deal, though it was in England. I stayed up to watch the footage.

I think that a lot of the MJ nostalgia will be closer to what I’m feeling, which is nostalgia for 1983, whereas Elvis and Diana were more mythic than Michael Jackson. Although Jackson will spark a lot of “just what happened?” speculation.

Michael Jackson’s obvious talent had long ago been overshadowed by the freak-show nature of his eccentricities, plastic surgeries, strange and failed marriages, and his many legal troubles. His death today is just the final confirmation of his long, slow decline of the person who dazzled us those many years ago. For all the troubles that he had, I think he’s found his final escape from them.

I honestly wish I could say that I’ll always remember him for Thriller if nothing else, but that would be dishonest. The saddest part is that whatever he achieved will be overshadowed by just how irrevocably strange he was. I don’t know if that’s the way it should be or not, but it’s unfortunate that there was nobody in his inner circle who sat him down and told him to “knock it the fuck off, already, because you’re going to be remembered for going to trial twice over child molestation charges, among other things, at least as much as for making Thriller.” Or maybe the tragedy is that at least one person did just that and he never took heed.

He was a tormented man, and now he isn’t. I hope, and it sounds like, his end came quickly and he deserved that, just like the rest of us do when it’s our time.

Being just slightly older than John and growing up without cable, I remember being young and staying up really really late one Friday night to watch the debut of the Thriller video on network TV. Blew my little mind.

I cannot believe that the 6pm news is all-Jackson. I can see 5 or 10 minutes, but this is just nuts. Farah gets a brief mention. No weather, no sports, just nonstop drivel about a talented nutcase. He didn’t find a cure for cancer, didn’t contribute to world peace. He was just a successful singer with serious emo issues.

Farrah died, I believe, with as much dignity as could be possible for a famous person with a tabloid life and a horrible disease.
How much do you wanna bet the next weeks/months/years are going to be spent going over all the details of Michael Jackson’s death, such as 911 recordings, paramedic statements, what the (hypothetical, as far as I know) maid saw, did he have a will, what will happen to the children, ad nauseum.
I wanted to be Farrah Fawcett in 1977 (I was 8) and I was in love with Michael Jackson for about 3 months in 1983. For that, I will remember them both.

Jackson was a deeply-troubled and deeply weird individual, but there’s no denying that he was, not merely one of the greatest pop musicians ever, but probably the most famous person on the planet. No exaggeration.

So I choose to remember him from the glory days of Off The Wall, Thriller, and Bad. Such a great talent, and such a great loss.

One can only wonder how Elton John will rewrite the lyrics to “Candle in the Wind” to fit and perform it at this memorial. Unless he’ll do it for both Michael and Farrah? Much wardrobe and rewrite for Elton…

Like every celebrity complete with their phobic insanities, Michael Jackson was a gifted singer and entertainer in his early life until he turned weird. Sad, but money does not bring happiness. Farrah was a pretty actress. Ed McMahon was a television sidekick, again, tons of money made and lost, more than I will ever have. David Carradine, an actor.

Yes death is sad, especially when sudden. But there are so many more people in this world more worthy of our sadness. It saddens me that it takes fame to make us feel sad. They were, after all, just people.

Dude – man, it is really sad. And Farrah too! We heard a little earlier because we were right downtown. There was a lot of questioning, but this a.m. there were paparazzi at St. John’s (for Farrah) and then this. It happened really, really fast. Poor Michael, RIP.

A shame it had to end this way, so suddenly. Despite all his weirdness and scandal, the tiny part of me that roots for underdogs was kind of looking forward to seeing musical and artistic Redemption after his 50-gig residency wrapped up.

I first saw him do the “moonwalk” during “Billie Jean” on the televised 25th anniversary special, Motown 25. I was like 13 years old, sitting cross-legged in front of our old television set, probably sporting a retro Bay City Rollers tee shirt. Even though I was a rock n’ roll kid, loved the Beatles, the Stone, Genesis (Peter Gabriel), and Led Zeppelin, I was blown away by the dude. Man, he was a phenomenal performer. I wonder if his legacy (legend) is going to go the way of Elvis Presley . . . morph into a cult following.

Earlier, when I heard about his death I was strangely unaffected. I was thinking more about the freak show he had become rather than the music.
When I got home after work, I listened to a few cuts from “Off the Wall” and “Thriller” to see if the music still worked for me. It does.

So, gathering it all together in some sort of a meaningful way is rather difficult but I’ll try.

It wasn’t just the music. Brilliant as the music was and is you have to also look at the way his dancing and his videos changed the direction of Pop music as a whole. In reality, and I know that this will be an arguable point, he influenced music in a way as much as the Beatles did two decades before. I’m not going to use the word genius here as I think it’s overused but I will say that Michael was brilliant in his way.

That extremely talented people lead extremely weird and troubled lives has been chronicled throughout history. In that, Michael was no different.

The pharmaceutical companies and lobbyists in D.C. should be ashamed of themselves. Drugs like Vicodin and Ambien are rotting America from the inside out . . . Michael was addicted to painkillers for decades. Post-Prazac Nation . . . now a Analgesic Nation of hallucinating game-playing, internets-surfing, pill-popping, country-invading zombies. It’s the Dawn of the Dead, sponsored by Abbott (and Costello).

Terribly sad. I’m gonna echo Cartoon Coyote, because from his early life, he didn’t seem that wierd. So even if he was shaping an orbit out past the sanity event horizon, there should have been someone saying “Dude, crazytown’s fun to visit, but come over here and have some reality, it can be great”. I can’t help but think that a lot of managers and handlers probably made a big wad of cash just feeding Jacko more and more Kool-Aid, rather than trying to give the poor sod an anchor in reality.

For me, the real tragedy is that it doesn’t look like he ever got to get back to some semblance of happiness with his own self, so this sad story ends without redemption. I might be talking absolute rot, but that’s the impression I’ve gotten over the years.

The media coverage (cable news breaking into programs when they didn’t do i for the Iran riots, showing helicopter footage of photographers standing around outside a hospital) reminded me of an old National Lampoon headline from about the time Thriller was released:

It’s so sad to hear about Michael Jackson. As a dancer, I’m performed almost every one of his hits in some form or another. A lot of celebrities have died recently, but he’s the first one that had a big impact on my life personally. It’s a really weird feeling. Anyway, nice post. ;)

Um, no, thats not the nose he was born with. But its good enough. If he had just stopped there…

As a TV comedian once said: “Wow, you have to love America, where else can a poor black boy grow up to be rich white woman?”

Michael Jackson will get more credit for the talent he once had, after the generation that knew the face he was born with, dies off. A man that outlived / “wore out” the creditable accomplishments of his life.

I really feel sorry for the kids. The mom gave them up for cash, their father’s family is a bunch of leeches and sycophants. Dad was massively in debt and now every vulture in the entertainment/media will descend and try to rip off a profit on their father’s corpse. The aftermath is going to almost as sad as his life.

The tone is warm and full, with a hint of fuzz. The riff whirls round and round through the intro and verse like a snake eating its tail. Then the bridge hits and the bassist lays down just one or two notes to pin the bottom end of the song down till the chorus, when the circular riff starts up again and keeps going back into the verse. No pops or slapping or off-beat funkiness, just simple, straight quarter notes. It’s blissful.

I don’t think I ever bought any of his music, (we won’t discuss some of the embarrassing albums I DID buy back when I was a kid and didn’t know any better.) but I gotta admit, he had an impact on the world.

I was in Grade 8, at my first ever high-school dance. All the lights were off and the VJ showed “Thriller” on the two big screen TVs. It was awesome (especially the reference to “American Werewolf in London”).

It’s been good for me to listen to the retrospective coverage on “Jacko” today. I’m old enough to have been witness to the entire arc of Michael’s performance life … and wow. An amazing talent. It’s much harder to talk about the other things in his life … other than with sadness at how much energy they cost (us all) and what might have been.

A life that eerily paralleled Elvis’s, in both the heights and the decline. If I was a mega-star, I would not accept the mantle of “the king of…” anything. The title appears to be cursed. The king is dead, long live the king…

Oh, and while we’re at it, save a passing thought for Farrah Fawcett who passed just a little earlier in the day than Jacko. Among other things, her swimsuit poster hit me at the same time as puberty, resulting in some interesting side-effects. Not as much “dynamic range” between her successes and failures when compared with MJ, but quite a bit of “dynamic range” in her acting career in terms of the roles she took on.

His nose problems started because he broke it, and then it didn’t get fixed up quite right, and then a while later he broke it again.

Or so it says on Wikipedia. Which is a really good article, actually, following his musical career and all the charitable work he did (including promoting AIDS research with Ryan White). A good read. I read the whole thing last night while listening to his videos on Youtube.

I regret the loss of the King of Pop Michael Jackson! Jacko is a legend. I hope he gets where he is now, finally in peace.
Leave also your last greeting at Michael Jackson on our site, thanks.
a big and now sad fan

#52: whatever your opinion of pharmaceutical companies and the use (or overuse) of painkillers in this country, I think it’s very safe to say that Jackson’s problems went miles deeper than merely using Vicodin. Let’s not mistake symptoms for causes here.

And also, let’s please remember that the man was, among other things, a professional dancer. Which, if you stick with it much past adolescence, tends to have the same long-term effects on your joints and tendons as being a professional hockey player. Additionally, if you believe Jackson’s publicists, he was diagnosed with Lupus (along with the vitiligo) in 1986, one of the primary effects of which is: crippling joint pain.

There’s no lack of perfectly good reasons to knock Jackson as a human being, but fuck if I’m going to begrudge the occasional (by which I mean daily or even hourly) vicodin to someone who likely had tendonitis in places where you and I don’t even realize we’ve got tendons.

I for one am very happy to see not many jokes at a time like this. After all, Michael was a great musician, dancer, and overall entertainer, but most of all he was a loving, and loved, father, brother, son, and friend of the majority of the WORLD.